IBM closed on its acquisition of the product and technology divisions of The Weather Company (TWC) today, which brings together the cloud data expertise from TWC and the powerful analytics capabilities that IBM has, as well as the ability to deeply analyze the data using Watson. Does this mean that you will soon be seeing Jack Arnold on the Weather Channel doing the morning AMHQ program, or out in the field with Jim Cantore? Ummm - no. IBM didn't buy the broadcasting part of the business, just the web business and the superb IT infrastructure behind it.

Remember when I said I was worried about a winter storm coming? Well like the title says, "it happened". The offical total I got was somewhere around 30 inches (76 cm), as you can see in the map (look for "Frederick" in the "Northwest of the Beltway" image). In the last post I said our International Cub was in restoration mode - and it still is. So we fell back on our much smaller Cub Cadet lawn tractors. We have two snowblowers, and two blades, one of each for each Cub Cadet. The first snowblower, our prime weapon, a two stage on the newer Cub, failed because the guy who sold it to us had stripped the gear and didn't tell us. Grrr. Then we tried pushing the snow, but it was just too deep. Last we hooked up the other snowblower, only a single stage on the poor old tired model 122 (which was made from 1965-1967). Success! After some shoveling to get a path to the top of the driveway (it lost traction on the slope) we were able to run it down the driveway and blow enough snow to open up a path for us to get out. Once the snow started melting it was too heavy to blow anymore so we used the hydrostatic drive on the newer Cub to push a blade around to do mop-up work. Here's a picture of the mighty model 122 earning its spot in history by saving my family from being trapped in the blizzard of 2016.